God makes his home with us little people – 2 Sam 7:1-16, Luke 1:26-38

4th Sunday of Advent (Year B); Holy Cross parish.

God gave David rest.  God had provided a palatial home for David the shepherd, had given him rule, but maybe most poignantly for us, our first reading tells us: God gave David rest.  Maybe in these days of December busy-ness, that’s what grabs us as the most extravagant gift: God gave David rest.  And David responds well.  He doesn’t respond wrongly, even if his response doesn’t display the full insight it might.  David is so grateful for this gracious gift that he wants to return the favor: he wants to build a magnificent house for God.  And God will eventually consent, even though it’s David’s son Solomon who will actually build the 20 story tall temple, because God delights in our attempts to do him honor.  But first God has a greater gift for David: a loving rebuke; an “O you of little faith”; a re-orientation.

God first wants to help David see that it’s not ultimately human building that matters.  God is the master builder, and God builds for us.  David wants to build God a house of cedar and stone, but God has a grander building plan.  God will raise up for David a house too, but the house he promises David is human, it’s a dynasty, or at least that’s how David understood it, and all his contemporaries.  It’s a form of immortality: even once David dies, he will have an ancestor on his throne, he and his reign will live forever, through his seed.  God is always greater.

And that’s why it must have been so catastrophic when the Davidid kings disappointed, and even more so when they disappeared.  In Mary’s time, the Jews had become used to being ruled by puppet kings installed by various imperial powers, at that time the Herodians had found favor with the Romans.  It might seem God’s promise had been thwarted.

A king on a throne could not understand the gracious extravagance of God’s gift, and those who put their trust in earthly power and might couldn’t, can’t ever.  Right before this visit by an angel to Mary in Luke’s gospel, the angel had visited the priest Zechariah to tell him that his barren wife Elizabeth would bear a child, John the Baptist.  A priest, in the holy of holies, a holy man in the holiest room in the holy Temple in the holy city… and he couldn’t accept this gracious extravagant gift, he couldn’t respond with faith.  The Temple was good, but wasn’t enough.

So what chance has this Mary got?  Everyone would have looked down on her, not just in comparison to a king or even an old respected priest.  She would have been triply belittled: a woman, girl really; a youth, just 12 or 13 years old; in a Podunk town surrounded by Gentiles.  But this little person gets it.  This little one responds in faith.  That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have questions, to not have questions would be to suffer from the pride of thinking she knows everything, and one thing she knows for sure is that she doesn’t, she knows she has a lot to ponder.  But, in her lowliness, she knows God’s graciousness.  Without the trappings of palace or Temple, she knows the Spirit’s active presence.  And she has the courage to dare to accept this word: that God would make his home in her.

Elizabeth’s pregnancy, which was a stumbling block for Zechariah, is an aid for her; it makes it easier for her to trust because she’s reminded that it’s in God’s nature to do great things for us, to break down barriers, defy expectations and bring life to barrenness. 

Did she think of Second Samuel chapter seven, our first reading, at that moment?  Maybe not explicitly, even thought the angel was all but quoting it to her, but she gained a profounder understanding of that text than King David or the prophet Nathan or the priest Zechariah could muster.  She understood that God’s greatness is not most fully revealed in a grandiose Temple, as beautiful as that might be.  She understood that God’s greatness is not most fully revealed in a dynasty, as just and compassionate as human authority has the potential to be.  She understood that that promised son was one, that that son was to be her son, that God makes his home in her, not because she was mighty, but because she was fragile.  The most fitting home for God is a human, made in the image and likeness of God.  The most fitting home for God is a little one, one who knows her need for redemption and whom He wills to redeem, to bring into his home forever.

Because that’s the immortality that God dares to dream of for us: not living on in our progeny via a dynasty to whom we’re father or mother; but living on forever as ourselves, in Him, as beloved daughters and sons, not grasping after power or prestige, but rejoicing to be little ones, followers of the God who made himself little to make his home with us.

As I was preparing this homily, I found myself humming Gavroche’s main song from Les Mis and, as I recalled the words, I thought it might actually be very fitting to let him have the final word:

They laugh at me, these fellows, just because I am small.
They laugh at me because I'm not a hundred feet tall.
I tell 'em there's a lot to learn down here on the ground.
The world is big but lil' people turn it around.